


Saxifraga

by wreathed



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Scientists, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Awkward Sexual Situations, Bickering, Canon Era, Closet Sex, Fade to Black, First Meetings, Gremlin Francis, Hate Sex, Humor, Lectures, M/M, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:15:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27535894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: For the prompt: A canon-era AU where Crozier went to the Arctic and returned, and Fitzjames is a member of the Royal Society who has some very incorrect ideas about Arctic flora and fauna that he is just dying to share, loudly.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 22
Kudos: 29
Collections: Fall Fitzier Exchange





	Saxifraga

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linguamortua](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/gifts).



> Lingua: I could have written for any of your prompts, which were all a delight. I hope this fits the bill!

With his left hand clenched and held, withdrawn, at the small of his back, Francis stands and surveys the lecture room as if back on deck and raising a defiant jaw against a ravaging blizzard somewhere at the very ends of the earth.

The greatest danger here is reputational rather than mortal. He waits for the seats to fill. Perhaps _fill_ might be too grand a word, but these days, a distinguished Royal Society Fellow and three times Arctic veteran, he can usually command a decent showing. Only a few short glugs of whisky have passed his lips from his hipflask ahead of the evening, for luck.

The talk will go well, he reminds himself: no-one can rightly mock him or impolitely mutter to their companion in consternation now has spent so much time on Royal Navy research ships and, at last, holds sufficient scientific credibility to overcome the limits of his birthplace. In part.

A tall, showy man who has placed down in front of himself a tall, showy hat sits down, alone, right in the middle of the front row. Finding Francis’s attention on him — when would anyone’s attention on the man be unwarranted or unwanted when he is clad in an outfit like that, Francis supposes — he catches Francis’s eye and moves his hand in something that seems partway between a wave and a salute. Altogether it is a less refined and sophisticated motion than what Francis, on first sight, would expect from someone like him.

Francis squints towards the man — his long-distance vision is not quite what it once was — and, finding he cannot place him at all, nods politely back. The man, who has a handsome if over-pleased smile, acts so sure of the two of them having had prior acquaintance it is as if he must know Francis from somewhere. In the face of this confidence Francis would second-guess himself and assume he is being unspeakably rude — hardly the first time he would have been accused with that charge — except for the fact that he is so certain that they have never set eyes on each other before. Francis knows most of the Royal Society’s usual faces and so, unless he is a youthful newcomer inducted during Francis’s most recent voyage, he is not another Fellow.

An ordinary member, a paying patron, he must be, whose paying of monetary dues excuses him from any other kind. An officer from a previous voyage Francis would surely remember. Unless, Francis wonders with a stab of appalled horror and one nervous lightning-fast glance back at the man just to be sure, if there is any chance he knows him from the dockside in a less salubrious sense. Likely not. Few people present there, including Francis, took care to remember faces. And if this man was of that sort, he was at a minimum too well-appointed to be so brazen about any prior liaison.

Francis, upright, steps to a corner of the dais and looks elsewhere in the audience instead, nodding acknowledgement to the normal and sensibly dressed faces he _does_ already know, lest his cheeks start colouring if he goes down the line of thoughts of the dockside any further. The room fills with perhaps only one or two seats left empty. He delivers his talk, on his findings on the wildlife and plants of the Arctic on his most recent voyage as a scientist (once, long ago, a sailor) attached to a Navy vessel for exploration, and only occasionally is distracted by the stranger’s face, which is watching Francis with gratifyingly rapt attention.

“Hallo,” the man calls out to Francis in a rich sort of voice, both in timbre and finances, following the lecture’s end (and resultant modest, perhaps even sometimes enthusiastic, round of applause) when most of the other attendees have departed. “Marvellous talk, I must say.”

“Thank you,” Francis replies, not being able to hide his frown nor the temperament he invariably tends towards. Despite their semantics, the words out of Fitzjames’s mouth do not sound in tone entirely like a compliment. “Who are you? Are you new?”

“James Fitzjames,” says James Fitzjames, his tone as if he is proudly reciting a new and self-discovered variety of rhyming meter. “As I say, marvellous talk; I’m a long-time admirer of your work. ‘Tis a shame on this occasion your conclusions could be improved on, but I can appreciate the rigour of your approach.” The last of this declaration is accompanied by a surprisingly incisive smile; a bright flash of healthy teeth.

“Been to the Arctic, have you,” glowers Francis, glancing to the room’s exits in order to plot his escape from this over-confident boor. “Or have you perhaps been to the Zoological Gallery at the British Museum, that being essentially the same thing.”

Fitzjames blinks at him, perhaps at last suitably discouraged. The usual impact of an uncivil manner seems to bounce off him like light from a mirror. “Well. I’ve read the studies of Thomas Pennant, and spoken to other explorers, and I feel duty-bound to remind you of his work on the Arctic skua and their kleptoparasitism.”

“I wouldn’t trouble yourself with the classical studies of somebody who never left continental Europe. Sorry, I don’t tend to consult with gentleman hobbyists, so if you’d excuse me.”

Quick as a flash and entirely unperturbed, Fitzjames reaches with one of his sizeable kid-gloved hands for a balustrade marking the end of a row of seating, blocking Francis’s exit. At these close quarters, Francis hears the creak of Fitzjames’s hand against the wood and sees the hard stare of his dark eyes.

“Oh, I am. I am not a first-born son,” Fitzjames says cheerily after a momentary verbal falter that he swallows around. “I stand to inherit nothing. Meaning I must make my own way in the world...”

“Wonderful. You’re entirely useless to me. Not even a potential source of funding.” What a thorn in his side this man is! He cannot be a proper scientific thinker: his clothes are designed to attract attention, cut at the waist too tightly for any investigations too strenuous, and he has had something done to curl his hair that must have taken time sensible people would have spent doing something much less frivolous and much more industrious.

“Would you accompany me to Elphinstone’s?”, Fitzjames asks, his hand moving from the balustrade to Francis’s upper arm, which Francis shakes off. A path cleared at last, Francis leaves the hall, but Fitzjames only goes and follows him. “They have these absolutely _delicious_ cocoanut pastries, you really must—”

“I am not electing to listen to your opinion on Arctic fauna, and I am certainly not going to elect to listen to your views on _cakes_ ,” Francis says, turning back around to face his new adversary directly. “Has there ever been a debate where you have found yourself unable to rouse an opinion for, leaving you on the fence?”

If there were a convenient surface available, Francis’s hand would have collided with it for emphasis. He considers with some satisfaction if Fitzjames’s fine sharp jawline would do in its place.

“You’re being rather rude, you know,” Fitzjames says.

“I know,” Francis replies. They carry on along the corridor, turning a corner. He would be wondering how he had ever thought Fitzjames handsome if it wasn’t for the unfortunate case that he continues to do so, if also now knowing him to be quite irritating.

“I was hoping we could meet and I could learn a great deal from you, and you perhaps a little from me, for this is not the first time I have come to one of your talks but I have never before been able to intercept you. I am a geographer and a naturalist,” Fitzjames says in earnest, “going by what have I have been encouraged to study. But I have longed dreamed to see an iceberg, and perhaps some penguins; I have only seen Hooker’s taxidermied specimen, you see.”

Francis presumes Fitzjames _must_ know there are no penguins in the Arctic, and after all Francis has been to both polar regions, but the confusion or conflation of the two habitats happens so often that it is enough to raise his ire. He does, however, for once hold his tongue.

“I wanted to go to sea for the Royal Navy as soon as I was able,” Fitzjames continues in a quieter voice, as if he was confiding some shameful secret. “But my aunt and uncle sent me away to school instead.”

Whoever this aunt and uncle were, they had done right by the boy, Francis thought. He recognised that urge, but then from his provincial place of birth he would have never been able to access such a high quality education without first spending his youthful years at sea. However, there was no need for Fitzjames to be telegraphing that difference between them quite so loudly.

Fitzjames pauses to clear his throat. “I see perhaps that you are too bull-headed to be debated with.” But still he does not go, and only now is Francis realising he must go to the trouble of formulating a plan to get free of him for at least long enough to be able to regain his bearings (which have been knocked somewhat off-kilter). 

At least Fitzjames is showing some interest, Francis concedes. But it is hard to warm to anyone of the sort who does not have to work in a job to earn a living, and why in God’s name did Fitzjames, as an amateur, greet Francis, if Fitzjames really did know who he was from his prior work, with an attempted argument as to why Francis was wrong?

Francis had not been walking towards anywhere in particular except away from Fitzjames (or so he had intended), but by now the two of them have reached a corridor with doors that led to a series of smaller meeting rooms. Francis confidently strides over to one, planning to pretend to Fitzjames he is about to meet another Fellow. For a private meeting. To which he is not invited.

Francis opens the door. It’s not the door to the Portico room. That’s the door beside to the right of this one, and Francis has temporarily them mixed up, despite being a regular and important visitor to Somerset House, and he puts his forgetfulness down to Fitzjames’s lingering proximity and unceasing irritatingness. 

This door is the door to a walk-in cupboard used for storage by the servants.

“Oh, how exciting!” says Fitzjames into the darkness. “Is this where the Arctic fauna specimens are kept? With the darkness to mimic the conditions of a polar night?”

There is a long pause.

“Yes”, Francis eventually says. “Come and see”, and then pushes Fitzjames insistently into the cupboard with his hand spread wide against Fitzjames’s lower back.

“Oh my, it _is_ very dark in here,” Fitzjames says once the door closes.

 _Once the door closes._ Jaw clenched, Francis gropes in the darkness for the handle. The door won’t open.

Francis gives a great internal sigh. He had not meant for himself to also be on this side of the door.

“God above, we're locked in,” Francis says, letting the back of his head fall against the wall in despair.

“Francis, I don’t think there’s anything in here but dusty old coats and some other odds and ends,” Fitzjames says, sounding as if he is trying to work out whether he’s been deliberately duped. “And now I suppose we have joined them.”

“ _Please_ don’t call me Francis,” Francis pleads. They had only met this _afternoon_. He would have added that Fitzjames is behaving at the height of impropriety, but then Francis is the one out of the two of them who has — accidentally — shoved them both in a cupboard.

What was there for Francis to do in this situation? Just at the very moment when he has finally achieved adequate respect from his peers within these hallowed walls, was he really going to hammer on the door and shout for help like some damsel requiring rescue? He was not.

“Is there anything you can educate me on while we wait for someone to come by?” Fitzjames asks slyly. He seems improperly close like this, breath at Francis’s temple, but then the cupboard is not really large enough to allow anything else. “I had hoped we would have a lively intellectual debate and then perhaps you would be able to tell me more about your voyages.”

“I truly have admired you for some time,” Fitzjames says into the pitch dark. “As an explorer, an intelligent man of science, and a sailor. Unmarried.”

“You admired me for being _unmarried_ ,” sighs Francis. He thinks of Sophia, currently accompanying Lady Jane on a sloop to the Eastern Mediterranean. Him remaining unmarried has hardly been through lack of trying.

“If we are not to talk about botany,” Fitzjames says, speaking quietly even though surely the aim of any noise they make in here is for someone else to hear them. “Perhaps there is an alternative activity we can do instead.”

“What we need to be doing is working out a way to get out of here,” Francis says irritably, lurching once again for the useless door handle. They are sealed in, and the temperature of their surroundings, at least as far as Francis perceives it, seems to be rising; perhaps there is a limit as to how much air they have left to breathe, and Francis doesn’t want to risk Fitzjames and his braggart conversation stealing all of it.

Francis jumps, a tremor of shock, as he feels Fitzjames reach for his wrist. His grip proves to be surprisingly firm around the thrum of Francis’s pulse as he positions Francis’s bare hand against the silk of his ostentatious waistcoat. Francis can feel Fitzjames’s further layers of clothing underneath it and then, someway underneath that, the heat to him, the faintest impression of his ribcage.

“Perhaps I can charm you around to my way of thinking,” Fitzjames says, definitely too close now for the merciless demands of propriety, and against his better judgement Francis’s heart hammers in his chest.

“I suppose,” Francis says, although his breathing has quickened, and he has to swallow before getting the rest of his words out, “that’s what you always manage to do. Well, I won’t be duped.”

“You’re impossible,” Fitzjames sighs, pressing Francis out of the little space he has left to himself and up against the wall, before taking his gloved hand and pressing the heel of his palm against the newly-apparent distention to the front of Francis’s trousers. “Well, most of you is, anyway.”

“This is how you intend to earn my respect?” Francis asks, pressing himself into Fitzjames’s touch, an edge of begrudging amusement now encroaching on his sceptical tone at the sheer strength of Fitzjames’s confidence and conviction.

“I have seen you before at lecture theatres. I have also spied you on Vere Street.”

“I don’t—”

“I don’t think you ever saw my face. I’ve not before held sufficient courage to approach you. In either locale. But whatever our differences or disagreements, I wouldn’t say no to more access to the _great_ Francis Crozier, FRS FRAS FLS. In any capacity.”

Francis’s interest in Fitzjames (he must assume he has no post-nominals) is showing no sign of abating, and Fitzjames’s hand curls around the whole of his hardness and squeezes, a most compromising manner, and Francis knows himself as a fool, a fool for this fool.

“Touch me, please,” Fitzjames asks of him, quieter still with his mouth against the line of Francis’s shoulder. Francis, finding absolution easier in darkness, moves his hand that’s broadly pressed against James’s abdomen up to where Fitzjames’s stock covers his collarbone and pushes him down to his knees. It is mere moments before Fitzjames’s enthusiastic mouth is on him.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, that day’s most surprised employee of the Royal Society opens the cupboard to find the two gentlemen both safe and sound, with only the slightest moan audible from Fitzjames as he is hurriedly flung backwards and away by Francis at the sound of the opening door. Fitzjames looks, when newly revealed to Francis in the encroaching light of the corridor, incriminatingly flushed and in disarray, and goodness knows what Francis himself must look like, but thankfully the servant doesn't appear to notice.

“I was looking for my hat,” Fitzjames says to their rescuer without much of his usual flair and out of a gratifyingly hoarse throat, turning away and peering into a cupboard door at ground level he has convincingly pulled open. He is politely informed that a hat had been left behind in the lecture room, and that he would be able to retrieve it from there.

“Does this mean you'll now give me leave to tell you the full theory behind my views on kleptoparasitism in Arctic organisms?” Fitzjames asks once they have been left alone in the corridor, discreetly brushing dust from his knees. He is still wild-eyed, and Francis considers with triumphant viciousness how he had been brought to completion in the wet pressure of Fitzjames’s broad and greedy mouth. As fate would have it, they had not yet had the chance for Francis to provide any sort of nominal reciprocation.

“I am still not going to listen to anything you have to say on the matter,” Francis says, and Fitzjames looks briefly outraged. “Especially not now I have found there is a use your mouth is far better for that talking.”

Out in the open as they are, Fitzjames complexion reddens, but he can make no proper retort.

“I could write it all down in a letter to you,” Fitzjames grumbles. “I really think if you'd only give me a few moments—“

“Perhaps if you continue to impress. I wouldn’t wish to divert the best utility of your hands either, Mister Fitzjames” Francis says, mouth momentarily threatening a shrewd leer, and makes for the exit.

“Take me to the Arctic with you,” Fitzjames calls out to Francis as he goes, hands noticeably twisted tightly together. _Pathetic_ , Francis thinks, right before feeling a rush of something else entirely.

“I am unlikely to venture there again,” Francis tells him in seriousness. “And you suit better comforts and brighter things than what can be found there, trust me in that.”

“I am looking to be mentored, not cossetted,” Fitzjames replies, once again scornful. 

“Damn it all. I will send my visiting card,” Francis concedes, allowing himself to consider how he might be able to once again enjoy the usefulness of Fitzjames and perhaps provide something in return, and Fitzjames, the tip of his tongue at his still-shining lips, inclines his head towards Francis and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come and say hi on [tumblr](https://wreathedwith.tumblr.com/post/634868514642083841/saxifraga-wreathed-the-terror-tv-2018)! (Message me on tumblr if you're on terror twitter and would like to follow me there.)
> 
> Thank you to the mods for such a well-run exchange!


End file.
